In this episode, I replaced the default Django test runner to use pytest. We walked through installation, configuration, how to change tests, and the benefits that come from using pytest.
We started by looking at the current state of the test suite to provide a baseline to compare against. After that, I went to PyPI to find the version of pytest-django that we wanted to install. I added the package to my requirements-dev.txt and installed the update.
$ pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
I created a pytest.ini file and configured the package by setting the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE. I initially typed the name of the setting incorrectly (forgetting the second S) so we debugged the failure case too.
Once pytest was running, we observed that all the tests passed. This behavior surprised me because I thought that the test would need to be marked to use a database. We dug into the details of the test execution to see which Python fixtures were used. We talked a bit about how fixtures worked.
I finished the stream by going through some tests and switching the assertion styles. We compared and contrasted assertions from unittest style tests versus pytest assertions.
This article first appeared on mattlayman.com.
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